2018-10-16 08:15:09
Ashik Al Afzal1, Md. Ali Asif Noor 1*; Dept. of Pharmaceutical Science; BRAC University1, C.A.: North South University1*
Each drug has some pharmacological properties that can produce biological effects on humans’ or animals’. It will only show it’s the effect when it is administrated inside the body. The process of administrating drugs inside the body is known as the drug delivery process. Improvement of drug efficacy and safety are the two most important goals here.
Drug Delivery Route: To administrate any drug there are several routes there, for example, oral, parenteral etc. Selection of route is very much important in case of getting maximum biological effects. There are 3 main factors which can help us in choosing routes for drug administration and they are 1. The expected effect 2. Type of disease 3. Type of product we want to administrate (i.e. tablet, capsule, suppository etc) The most common routes of a drug administration include the following:
Oral route- This is the oldest and most common routes of drug administration. In here drugs are taken orally. Many medications are taken orally because they are intended to have a systemic effect, reaching different parts of the body via the bloodstream.
Parenteral route- It refers to any non-oral means of administration. The common parenteral routes are intramuscular (IM), subcutaneous (SC) and intravenous (IV). This route is very much effective in terms of therapeutic effects and recently many drugs are specially designing for the parenteral route as it gives rapid action.
Transdermal route– In here active ingredients are delivered across the skin for systemic distribution. Inhalation route- Drugs which are administered by this route will directly go the lungs so the drug particles must be atomized into smaller droplets so that the drugs can pass through the windpipe and into the lungs. It has many significant advantages but the most important one is it increases the bioavailability of drugs in the system. In the case of the respiratory disease, this route is considered as the first choice treatment.
Drug Delivery System Development– The demand for more sophisticated and potent drugs are increasing day by day. Currently, the researchers in the pharmaceutical and industries are working on the development of more sophisticated and potent drugs. These are mainly composed of protein and/ or DNA. Their greater advantage is they can liberate their bioactive ingredients at the right time, site and in safe concentration, as a result, they can control toxicity. To cope with these challenges, bioengineers are designing platforms that are biocompatible, bifunctional, and/or biomimetic. We can use these techniques on drugs which usually have the narrow therapeutic window and high toxic level as they can control time, site and concentration.
Conclusion: As we have seen the importance of administration routes in drug delivery so it is very important for the open access journals to encourage researchers and clinicians to work hard in order to develop these techniques which will lead us to design more potent and sophisticated drugs with low side effects.
